A MICHIGAN school district has spent $45,000 to supply “Smart Phones” to all its third graders. The Kalamazoo Gazette reports:

The expectation is that children will be able to do many of their assignments on their devices, including homework. One advantage is that teachers will be able to create more individualized worksheets and homework assignments based on each child’s ability, so that advanced students are provided more challenges and struggling students are given work that will boost their skills.

But the real advantage of the [phone] program is that it makes schoolwork fun and engaging, which means children spend more time on their schoolwork, officials say. (more…)

  A CONGRESSIONAL panel has recommended that the Defense Department open up all combat units to women. According to Air Force Times: A five-page analysis prepared for the commission concluded that women do not lack the physical ability to perform combat roles; gender integration will not negatively affect unit cohesion; and women are not more likely than men to develop mental health problems.

IN  the previous entry, Josh F. writes,”What exactly is a man’s incentive to join a collective of hopelessness?” That’s exactly what the men’s rights movement is, a collective of hopelessness, and other commenters in that thread amply illustrate this. See the rest of Josh’s excellent observations at the end of the discussion.

Also, Jesse Powell writes: “Why is it the men’s rights supporters love to talk about the destruction of Western civilization and how great this destruction is? Why do they positively celebrate the decline in marriage calling it “the marriage strike”? I suspect men’s rights supporters know their condemnation of marriage and their refusal to fulfill their obligations as men is destructive to society and so they embrace and glorify the destruction of society in order to legitimize and glorify their own anti-social behaviors.”

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REX writes: 

I have a question regarding your position on the Men’s Rights Movement.

The way I see it, you have repeatedly rejected the MRM because, fundamentally, you see it as representing the same type of divisive ‘gender particularism’ which exists in the feminist movement. In your view, the MRM is flawed because it goes against your basic view of sex relations, which is one of reciprocity, cooperation, and mutual appreciation of complementary characteristics. (more…)

SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH PROKUDIN-GORSKII, an innovator in color photography, documented pre-Revolutionary Russia from 1909 to 1915. In thousands of vivid photographs, Prokudin-Gorski captured a world on the eve of World War I and the Revolution. He recorded monasteries, children at play, women in peasant dress, machine rooms in factories, mines, dams, wildflowers in bloom and views of cities and villages. He traveled throughout an empire that stretched 7,000 miles from West to East in a railcar with its own darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II. Half of his collection was confiscated by authorities before he fled to France in 1918 and the rest are owned by the Library of Congress, which offers easy access to them online. They provide a fascinating look at a lost world. (more…)

A NEW report, “When Marriages Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America,” by the National Marriage Project has received widespread publicity in the news. The basic finding of the report is that marriage is deteriorating in the moderately-educated middle class. Among the college educated, the report states, family life is fairly stable and healthy. I recommend Jesse Powell’s interesting analysis of these findings in this thread.

There are several important factors to keep in mind that suggest the nation’s elite are not as conservative or stable as the report suggests:

• Many of those in the middle class who would have remained in the moderately-educated category in the recent past are now in the highly-educated category. The number of those earning college degrees has grown dramatically. To compare the highly-educated now with the highly-educated of three or four decades ago is to compare two entirely different groups. If one defines middle class as those without college degrees then the definition of what is middle class has changed dramatically.

• Those in the “highly-educated category” are seeing higher rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing. (more…)

JULIAN ASSANGE has surrendered himself to authorities in response to bizarre accusations of sexual wrongdoing that could only be possible in some feminist dystopia. It’s all too amazing to absorb, even for someone whose expectations of today’s women are depressingly low. In Sweden, it seems a man can be charged with rape if his condom breaks while engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman who has practically hunted him down. Here is a full account from The Daily Mail.

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THE NATIONAL MARRIAGE PROJECT has released its latest report, “When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America,” showing once again that family stability has declined significantly in the middle and lower classes, while rising modestly among the highly successful.  According to the study’s summary:

The children of highly educated parents are now more likely than in the recent past to be living with their mother and father, while children with moderately educated parents are far less likely to be living with their mother and father.

Specifically, the percentage of 14-year-old girls with highly educated mothers living with both their parents rose from 80 to 81 percent from the 1970s to the 2000s, but the percentage of 14-year-old girls with moderately educated mothers living with both parents fell from 74 to 58 percent. And the percentage of 14-year-old girls with the least-educated mothers living with both parents fell from 65 to 52 percent.

Overall, then, the family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children. (more…)

  LITERARY scholars are using the massive digital archives assembled by Google Books to analyse cultural trends. This article in The New York  Times quotes breathless, overblown predictions of how their findings will alter the study of literature and philosophy, as if technology can magically transform our understanding of intellectual history and ideas. Still, it's interesting to see how cultural trends can be quantified through changes in book titles. Professors at George Mason University, for instance, have documented the rise of skepticism in the 19th century.  From 1840 to 1910, the number of all books with 'Christianity' or 'God' in their titles declined from almost two percent to below .4 percent. Also, the word "universal" became much less common.

JESSE POWELL writes:

A new ritual in Japan is drawing a lot of attention: the “divorce ceremony.” As described in The Telegraph, divorcing couples go through a ceremony to which they invite their family and friends but instead of celebrating the beginning of their new lives together they celebrate their freedom and escape from a broken marriage. “From drinking toasts to never seeing each other again, through to symbolic rides in separate rickshaws to reflect the start of a new journey, the ceremonies consist of a string of symbolic acts to mark the definitive end of a marriage.” The article goes on to say: “Yet with divorce still something of a taboo in Japanese society, the ceremonies have caught on as a way to publicly formalise the separation in a way that is socially acceptable to friends and family.” A 32 year-old-businessman invited to one of these ceremonies had this to say: “I think the ‘divorce ceremony’ phenomenon in Japan is healthy – a sign that the country can embrace change as a national ‘family,’ rather than a cold-hearted ‘system’ of sclerotic preconceived taboos.” 

For some historical perspective on divorce in Japan from the Japan Statistics Bureau; in 1960 the divorce rate was 8 percent; in 1970 it was 9.3 percent; in 1980 it was 18.3 percent; in 1990 it was 21.8 percent; in 2000 it was 33.1 percent; and in 2007 it was 35.4 percent. (more…)

  LAST JUNE, Luigi Padovese, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of the Turkish port city of Iskenderun, was murdered in his home by a 26-year-old Muslim who stabbed him eight times in the heart and then severed his head while shouting "Allah is the greatest." He was one of many priests murdered in Turkey since 2008. Here are words of appropriate outrage from Europe.  Austrian MP Ewald Stadler, in a speech addressed to the Turkish ambassador last week, decries the Islamification of the West and the "romance of tolerance and human rights." "Your devotion to freedom of religion is pure hypocrisy," Stadler says to members of parliament who accuse him of being overdramatic.  His words could justifiably be addressed to the Catholic Church as well. This is a stunning speech.

HERE IS an excerpt from a speech by Austrian anti-Islamization activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who spoke this weekend at a conference of the Alliance of the European Freedom and National Parties in Ashkelon, Israel:

No civilization is eternal. Because Western Civilization has been in the ascendant for the last few centuries, there is a tendency to think that what we have built is the final state at which mankind has arrived–that we have reached, as Francis Fukuyama put it, “The End of History.”

This is hubris of the highest order, especially given all the indicators of the dangers currently faced by our civilization, both from without and from within. The signs may not always be obvious, but they are there, and they are growing in number.

The death of a civilization does not come only when sand dunes drift in over the rubble of a once-proud city. The end is not necessarily marked by an invasion of barbarian hordes, or the burning and looting of our homes and businesses.

A civilization can also die from within, when it forgets the core values that once made it great, when it stops believing in its own fundamental tenets. (more…)

IN THE previous entry on recent remarks by Pope Benedict XVI in a book of interviews with German journalist Peter Seewald, readers took strong issue with my criticisms of the Pope. I am grateful for these thoughtful comments and do not dismiss them at all. (more…)

I WAS talking to a 23-year-old man today at a social gathering. He is someone who is very smart and good-looking, but suffers from the typical adolescent tendency to veer between self-glorification and self-disgust. He needs a job, desperately at this point, and I asked him how it was going. He said it was not going well. Even though he knows nothing about my own opinions here, he then expressed a Thinking Housewife truism.

“Why would anyone hire me when they can hire a pretty girl?” he said.  “I mean, I would hire a pretty girl over me too. Everyone wants to work with a pretty girl.”

It’s true. It’s also true that a young pretty girl will most likely never be the sole or main support of a family. She does not need a job in the same way. (more…)

KILROY M., who lives in Australia, writes: 

IN THIS entry, the reader Chris disputes another commenter’s claim that feminism is on the wane. Chris writes:

I would very much like to share your optimism. But I know of no effort by conservatives in Congress, or in the churches to repeal Title IX. There is no one within the Republican Party who is speaking up with regards to the dearth of men teaching in our schools. No one within the recent Tea Party phenomena expressed any interest in eliminating the blatantly unconstitutional sections of the Violence Against Women Act. No state legislature I know of is planning to reform “no-fault divorce.” (more…)

AT The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau reflects on determinism and morality. He examines three Late Antique works, Satyricon, The Golden Ass, and St. Augustine’s Confessions, in light of one of the key tenets of modern liberalism — the notion that we are compelled to sin by external forces.

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